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The Politics of Press Censorship in Vietnam

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The Politics of Press Censorship in Vietnam HIJXXX10.1177/1940161213508814The International Journal of Press/PoliticsCain 508814research-article2013 Article The International Journal of Press/Politics XX(X) 1 –23 Kill One to Warn One © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: Hundred: The Politics of Press sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1940161213508814 Censorship in Vietnam ijpp.sagepub.com Geoffrey Cain1 Abstract Recent literature on “soft authoritarianism” has called into question the extent to which policy, rather than personality and patronage, sets the direction of elite politics in the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). This strand of thinking argues that the state’s direction toward “reform” is not as coherent as commonly believed, a relevant model for examining the role of the state-owned print and online press as an arm of Vietnam’s post-communist marketization project. It argues that Party leaders, facing a breakdown of consensus across the spectrum of political and business elites, are using the press in an attempt to manage a growing number of voices in the political system, but that reporting on many political and corruption scandals has simply become unmanageable for state leaders. Under this paradigm, policy debates between “reformers” and “conservatives” in Vietnam fall short of explaining press censorship. This semidemocratic concept of the media’s role opens up room for a wider understanding of civil society under transitional regimes in Asia. This paper draws on twenty-nine interviews with Vietnamese journalists, editors, media executives, Vietnamese and foreign journalism trainers, and government officials from 2010 to 2011, as well as an analysis of press coverage and internal newsroom documents. Keywords Vietnam, journalism, Internet and media censorship, Communist Party, marketization 1School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK Corresponding Author: Geoffrey Cain, Gyeonggi-do Yangju-si Baekseok-eub Beokji-ri, Kaya 2cha Apt. 201dong 109ho, South Korea 482-831. Email: [email protected] 2 The International Journal of Press/Politics XX(X) Introduction: Press Censorship under the Politics of Marketization On January 5, 2012, members of fish farmer Doan Van Vuon’s family opened fire on more than one hundred police officers and soldiers trying to evict him and others from their homes in the Tien Lang district in the northern port city of Haiphong. He was being pushed off his state-owned plot a year before his lease was set to end (McKinley 2012). Six officers were injured in the fighting, leading Vuon and three relatives to be charged with attempted murder (Marr 2012). In a nation where economic decentraliza- tion has lent more political power to local and provincial officials, and where those figures are able to profit through land evictions in the countryside, the story was just like any other and at first did not receive much coverage. Vietnam’s state-run press published quick reports based on police sources, which peddled the narrative that Vuon was a criminal who had used illegal firearms. A month later, however, the situa- tion went from a hushed skirmish to a national imbroglio that the Communist Party was unable, and unwilling, to control. Two newspapers, Nông Thôn Ngày Nay (Countryside Today) and Pháp Luật Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh (Ho Chi Minh City Law), unearthed their own findings that district officials broke an earlier agreement reached in court and lied about statements made by witnesses (McKinley 2012). The Tien Lang affair, as the case was called, released a torrent of popular griev- ances over corruption in local police departments. Yet rather than attempt to end the controversial and potentially damaging coverage as would be expected in this one- party state, leaders permitted the reporting to continue because, they even admitted publicly, exposing the local government malaise was also in its interests, while on the other hand, officials simply could not command press coverage over an incident that became so enormous. In February, relentless media criticism against district officials prompted Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to issue a rare statement announcing that heads would roll. The prime minister’s spokesman publicly praised the two newspa- pers for providing “timely reports [that had] helped the central government agencies see the matter clearly and proceed to deal with it in an appropriate way.” Newspapers, he said, did a good work “serving the nation” and “orienting public opinion” (Brown 2012: 1). His comments on the Tien Lang affair summed up the tumultuous and often con- flicted role of the state-controlled media in Vietnam: that the Party wants the press to be “a tool for managing society” (Hayton 2010: 158), a state-sanctioned watchdog that can keep a check on the growing power of decentralized bureaucrats, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and rival party factions while appeasing popular discontent against the regime itself. Indeed, the Tien Lang case had much power to undermine the party’s legitimacy at a time when Vietnamese farmers and laborers complained that wide- spread corruption and inflation—at the time, the highest in Asia—was cutting sharply into their income. That the party-state correspondingly kept an evenhanded grip on the reporting that suggests this was not an example of complete press “liberalization,” but one of partial liberalization when the political elite simply could not keep a lid on an explosion of press reporting, and found it in its interests to go along with popular Cain 3 grievances. This protected the party's proclaimed status as the benevolent parent of national development. This episode, however, did not mean that journalists were completely free to pursue hard-hitting investigative stories. Internet journalists and media executives later told the media researcher Catherine McKinley that they continued to be pressured by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) to remove critical reader com- ments from their websites. The government permitted wide publishing on this story because it involved a single farmer in a small district—hardly an example of heavy- weight corruption in the Politburo of Hanoi (McKinley 2012). By allowing for a flow- ering of controversial coverage, the party fashioned itself as having a popular mandate to address the grievances of the people while reasserting its control on the periphery. With the Tien Lang model as a starting point, this paper will examine relations between the party-state and the government-supervised media in the contemporary political arena of Vietnam. In this system, the state-sanctioned press was the pragmatic creation out of the necessity to curb corruption, a major block to economic develop- ment, during the Doi Moi (renovation) marketization project starting in 1986. Because the press holds this task of informal policing, a study of Vietnamese journalism can reveal much about “civil society” in a period of economic growth without correspond- ing political “liberalization.” Relaxations and crackdowns against the press are pur- posefully unpredictable and arbitrary, although reporters run a higher risk of reprisals when they publish allegations against high-ranking officials. Because the media hold a political position directly under Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) elites, this pat- tern of persecution against them reveals much about how the media are used as a tool of enforcement from the political center, even if top leaders in Hanoi cannot keep complete control over the activities of increasingly profit- and justice-driven journal- ists. Indeed, the media do not always act in tandem with Party interests. They instead attempt to exploit the growing space between the regime’s political censorship of the media and the need to use the media as tools of economic development and of curbing corruption. (I am grateful to an anonymous peer reviewer for this phrasing.) This paper is divided into four parts. The “Method” section lays out the procedure of and problems inherent in carrying out fieldwork in Vietnam, as well as the reasons for picking the two case studies. The literature review then delves into an examination of “soft authoritarianism” in Vietnam, summarizing institutional, informal, and patron- age-based theories of state and civil society. A brief comparison to China, which is experiencing a similar path toward marketization directed by party elites, isolates fac- tors that may explain why Vietnamese bureaucratic mechanisms seek to exploit a state-supervised semiwatchdog press. The background section then analyzes how and why the Party, during and after the Doi Moi economic reforms, gives the press the awkward position of state-sponsored watchdog, a role that reinforces the state’s ability to allow for controversial coverage and then halt it if reportage moves too high up the food chain. The paper finishes with two case studies that demonstrate how the press continues to be used in a similar manner today, and concludes on a note with relevance to the broader study of comparative journalism under transitional states. 4 The International Journal of Press/Politics XX(X) Method This paper makes use of a number of first-person and secondary sources. It draws on ten months of field research in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi carried out from August 2010 to June 2011 on a Fulbright grant. The author interviewed twenty-nine journal- ists, bloggers, editors, media businesspeople, public relations officers, and govern- ment officials, although not all interviews are used in this paper because
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